Flickr remains the photo social network of record. It's not just a place you can upload, organize, and back up all your smartphone shots as well as high-resolution images from a DSLR, but it's where you can participate in a huge community of professional and amateur photographers. You'll find current photography from the White House, the British Monarchy, and most other major institutions on Flickr. You get a free terabyte of online storage for your photos with Flickr, and whiz-bang technology automatically tags photos based on what's in them—a beach, a bird, or a group of people. Upgrade to a Pro account ($5.99 per month or $49.99 per year), and you get the slick desktop auto-uploader, ad-free viewing, and unlimited storage. With the richest combination photo and social features, along with a large, active community, Flickr is our image-sharing Editors' Choice.

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Signing Up and Setting UpIf you have a Yahoo account, you already have a Flickr account. Otherwise you can sign up for the free ad-supported 1TB account. Yahoo now requires you to enter a mobile phone number to create an account, which I find irksome, but it's an attempt by the service to keep out spammers. It also helps prevent others from hijacking your account.

The Pro account level (currently discounted to $34.99) also gets you detailed traffic stats for your photos and a 20-percent discount on Adobe's Creative Cloud Photography plan (which includes Photoshop and Lightroom). In addition, it gets you a "PRO" designation next to your name, so that other users take you seriously.

For comparison, SmugMug offers no free account and charges $40 per year for its Basic account, which gets you unlimited uploads and a customizable site. Photobucket offers 10GB free (only 1/100th of what Flickr gets you) and charges $49.99 per year for 50GB. It lets you go ad-free for $9.99 a year. Furthermore, a half terabyte of Photobucket will run you $399.99 per year. As long as your photos are 16-megapixel or less, Google Photos gives you unlimited storage for free, but only 15GB for larger images (each photo in Flickr can be up to 200MB in size). To get an unlimited terabyte of storage with Google Photos you'd pay $119.88 per year. 500px, a beautiful site catering to pros wanting to sell their best photos, lets free users upload 20 photos per week, which rises to unlimited for $25 a year.

An optional part of setup is to install the new Flickr Uploadr application (now only available to Pro users). This is a far cry from its bare-bones counterpart of the past, and it can automatically upload (privately) images from folders and plugged-in camera media. After installing the lightweight 21MB program you log into your account, and select which folders to auto-upload (Desktop, Downloads, and Pictures are selected by default, but you can add or remove folders to taste). The app notifies you of its activities from a system tray icon, which also provides a link to your Web Camera Roll (see below). It also lets you pause uploading when you need your Internet connection for other activities, and view status in the Uploadr utility.

When I plugged in my camera media, the app prompted me that a new disk had been added, and asked if I wanted to upload photos. On the whole, the app is clear, modern, and automatic. But you don't need to install the Uploadr software: The Web-based upload page, accessible from the cloud-up-arrow icon, is brilliant, letting you tag, caption, set privacy, and even rotate photos before and during upload.

InterfaceFlickr is really about getting your photos seen by your contacts and you seeing theirs. To this end, the default view when you load the site into your browser is of recent images from your contacts. It's not just an unmoderated firehose like a Twitter feed; rather, images that have been starred by other users take precedence. For example, you're more likely to see a full-page-width photo if it's been starred by a lot of users. This view has infinite scroll, so you can just scroll down to see the feed as long as you like, with the latest images on top and older ones lower down. Along the right side are links to the Flickr blog and users you might know, and, if you're a free user, ads. Thankfully they're not aggressive or distracting.

So how do you find good photographers to follow? You can click Explore, where you'll see the most-favorited photos on the service. These have gotten more postcard-ish and less artistic in recent years, with a more mainstream audience joining Flickr, but scroll down far enough and you're sure to find some real gems. The photographer's handle always appears with an image, and following them is a click away.

Clicking any image opens the photo page, which removes the right panel and darkens the background so that you can focus on the shot. It also presents thumbnails of the photographer's photo stream. You can always hit the back and forward arrow keys to move through a photo stream, or you can click on a thumbnail to jump. Clicking with the mouse on top of a photo zooms it to actual size, and you can pan around by moving the mouse. There's also a full-screen view, accessible by the top-right corner arrows.

On the lower part of the photo page, you can also favorite, share, and download the image (if the member has permitted this). Sharing is handled well, with direct links to Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Pinterest, as well as email and embed codes. Or you could just grab a direct link to the photo and paste it anywhere.

But that's just the beginning: There's a lot going on in the lower part of the photo page. A big blue button lets you follow the photographer if you haven't already, and you can also see how many times the photo's been viewed, starred, and commented on. Below this to the left are any comments, and to the right is detailed information about the photo, including the camera model used, lens and shutter settings, and (if the photographer hasn't disabled it) the whole set of EXIF data. Try that in Instagram, which doesn't even let you zoom in on photos.

It doesn't end there. You can see if the photo's been added to any groups or galleries (see below), as well as its privacy and safety levels. There's also an area for adding keyword tags and people tags. The latter can be Flickr users or just email addresses. One item that sometimes shows up here is a geotag map. It's something I wish more Flickr photographers would use.

Keyboard shortcuts are a recent interface addition to Flickr. You can now hit F to Favorite, C to Comment, and S to Search, for example.

Camera RollNot enough organizing options? Camera Roll is a term that will be familiar to iPhone users. Where Photo Stream has always been chronologically arranged by the date and time of upload, and only appears as fairly large tiles, the new Camera Roll view lets you sort by date in small square thumbnails.

But the real cool-factor comes with Magic View, which can sort photos by 60 content types, such as people, animals, landscapes, and so on. It's a pretty awesome display of machine learning, and it was surprisingly accurate on my large photo collection, grouping animals, architecture, landscapes, and even subgrouping them. The categorization uses tags that you can see for this, so you can correct a miscategorization simply by removing the clearly marked robot tags.

Google Photos has a similar feature, but you only see it in action after typing something into its search box; you don't get an organized grid view like that above. Nor do you get to see the automatically generated keyword tags the way you do in Flickr. And forget about such wizardry in photo hosting site competitors like Photobucket and SmugMug, though Microsoft's OneDrive now offers similar photo auto-tagging in beta.

The new Camera Roll view shows all your photos, whether they're publicly visible or not. This is particularly useful if you've installed the Flickr app on your mobile phone and set it to auto-upload photos. There are so many apps besides Flickr that can do this these days—Dropbox, Facebook, Google Photos, OneDrive, along with many of the online backup providers. But Flickr offers advantages over all of them, with its many rich Web viewing and sharing options.

Profile Page Like many social sites, the Flickr profile takes a page from Facebook by letting you choose a cover photo as a banner atop your page and background to your profile photo. You can choose from recent photos in your stream or upload a new image for your cover photo. Some Pro users may be miffed that they can't choose the presentation of their images on their profile page, but Flickr was never intended as a portfolio site with lots of individual control over webpage design. For that, look to SmugMug.

Search Flickr also boasts an updated search feature that uses the same image intelligence, letting you find photos with more accuracy using new search algorithms. Advanced options let you filter the found photos by color, size, orientation (portrait or landscape), and content type (photo or video).

Tagging, Faces, and MapsYou can apply tags and attach names to photos at the uploading step, but you can also add and edit tags on a photo's page, and Flickr remembers all your previous tags, so you can easily click on them to apply to a new photo. Photo editing and management programs like iPhoto and Lightroom also can transfer tags to Flickr that you've applied inside the applications. Once your photos are tagged, they'll be more easily searchable by Flickr visitors, and it will be much easier for you to find all those photos that, say, included your cat.

Each of your photo pages has a location field, the clicking of which lets you add it to your map if it hasn't been added automatically by your camera's built-in GPS (such as that on the Canon EOS 6D). If you do want to add the photo to your map, you drag a pointer to the spot where you shot the photo. If the image already has location data embedded, as is usually the case for pictures taken with a smartphone, Flickr's map will propose the exact location you actually snapped the picture—try that using Facebook!

Though Flickr does let you assign People tags, the feature is more limited than what you can get in Facebook or Picasa. For starters, there's no face recognition. You simply have to tell Flickr that the picture includes a person. In Picasa, if your person isn't a contact in the service, you can simply use any name. You could just use a standard tag for this purpose.

Editing in AviaryFor a long time, Flickr integrated with the excellent Web-based Picnik photo editor/enhancer to allow you to make changes to your photos without leaving the site. Since Google bought and shut down Picnik's owner Picasa, Flickr has shifted this functionality to another Web photo editor, Aviary. Accessible from any photo's Edit button, Aviary's very simple interface offers autofixes, as well as a crop tool, an "orientation" tool that lets you level photos, and a decent selection of Instagram-like effects.

Aviary's red-eye and blemish correction work fairly well, but if you want a more powerful Web-based photo editor, check out Autodesk's Pixlr.com or Adobe's Photoshop Express, either of which can access your Flickr photos. One advantage of Flickr's Aviary, though, is that it doesn't require the Adobe Flash plugin, as most other online photo editors do. This means it should work in Flash-free browsers.

VideoFlickr is primarily a still image site, but for years you've been able to upload HD video clips. The intention was to use this capability not for YouTube-style videos, but for "long photos." With the recent Flickr update, your long photos can be longer—up to three minutes and up to 1GB, and there's no limit on how many you can upload. With a terabyte to burn, that's a lot of 1080p HD video.

CommunityFlickr offers an unequalled number of avenues that further connecting with fellow photo enthusiasts—groups, contacts, a profile, and even Flickr mail for communicating inside the service with your contacts. You can designate any other member as a contact, and further identify them as friends or family. Community is so important to Flickr, that your home page on the site, after greeting you in a different language every day, shows activity for your account—new contacts, newly favorited photos, and new comments on your pictures.

With well over 10 million users in groups, you'd be hard-pressed to find a larger selection of photo-based interest groups anywhere. If you want to join a group focusing on Birds of Prey photos, you'll find one with lots of activity on Flickr. Topics span an amazing range, from nature to Extar 100 film photography to travel and portraiture. There's a group for every photographic style and taste. By comparison, the most popular SmugMug group I could find had only about 3,000 members. Some Flickr groups boast in the tens of thousands of members, and some in the hundreds of thousands, with millions of photos submitted. If you don't see a group focused on your passion, create a new one—any user can.

StatsYou can see how many times any photo you've uploaded has been viewed right on the photo page, but for detailed reports, you'll need a Pro account; this has been the case for several years. Flickr recently changed the stats tool, and though it shows you how many times your photos were viewed over the past two months, you can't zoom back to any date the way you used to be able to. I also had a problem opening my photo with the most comments from the stats page. One improvement is that it shows you if traffic came from social networks like Facebook and Pinterest.

A Flickr of GreatnessFlickr's offerings, both photography and community-wise, are unmatched. Just being able to view full-size, full resolution photos, along with metadata and tagging (face, geo, and keyword) bests competitors like Instagram. Google Photos can't boast Flickr's social community features (especially its groups), and limits you to 16 megapixels or 15GB, which isn't enough for serious photographers. While Facebook has made strides with photos, it still down-samples them drastically. 500px doesn't suffer from that, but has limited organization features. I've already outlined above how Flickr bests its closer rivals, SmugMug and Photobucket. For being the fullest offering with the most generous terms, Flickr is PCMag's Editors' Choice for online photo storage and sharing.

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About the Author

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine's lead analyst for software and web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine's coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of web services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine's S... See Full Bio

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